Tales of Troy: Ulysses, the sacker of cities eBook

THE BOYHOOD AND PARENTS OF ULYSSES

Long ago, in a little island called Ithaca, on the
west coast of Greece, there lived a king named Laertes.
His kingdom was small and mountainous. People
used to say that Ithaca “lay like a shield upon
the sea,” which sounds as if it were a flat
country. But in those times shields were very
large, and rose at the middle into two peaks with a
hollow between them, so that Ithaca, seen far off
in the sea, with her two chief mountain peaks, and
a cloven valley between them, looked exactly like a
shield. The country was so rough that men kept
no horses, for, at that time, people drove, standing
up in little light chariots with two horses; they
never rode, and there was no cavalry in battle:
men fought from chariots. When Ulysses, the
son of Laertes, King of Ithaca grew up, he never fought
from a chariot, for he had none, but always on foot.

If there were no horses in Ithaca, there was plenty
of cattle. The father of Ulysses had flocks
of sheep, and herds of swine, and wild goats, deer,
and hares lived in the hills and in the plains.
The sea was full of fish of many sorts, which men
caught with nets, and with rod and line and hook.

Thus Ithaca was a good island to live in. The
summer was long, and there was hardly any winter;
only a few cold weeks, and then the swallows came
back, and the plains were like a garden, all covered
with wild flowers—­violets, lilies, narcissus,
and roses. With the blue sky and the blue sea,
the island was beautiful. White temples stood
on the shores; and the Nymphs, a sort of fairies,
had their little shrines built of stone, with wild
rose-bushes hanging over them.

Other islands lay within sight, crowned with mountains,
stretching away, one behind the other, into the sunset.
Ulysses in the course of his life saw many rich countries,
and great cities of men, but, wherever he was, his
heart was always in the little isle of Ithaca, where
he had learned how to row, and how to sail a boat,
and how to shoot with bow and arrow, and to hunt boars
and stags, and manage his hounds.

The mother of Ulysses was called Anticleia: she
was the daughter of King Autolycus, who lived near
Parnassus, a mountain on the mainland. This
King Autolycus was the most cunning of men. He
was a Master Thief, and could steal a man’s
pillow from under his head, but he does not seem to
have been thought worse of for this. The Greeks
had a God of Thieves, named Hermes, whom Autolycus
worshipped, and people thought more good of his cunning
tricks than harm of his dishonesty. Perhaps these
tricks of his were only practised for amusement; however
that may be, Ulysses became as artful as his grandfather;
he was both the bravest and the most cunning of men,
but Ulysses never stole things, except once, as we
shall hear, from the enemy in time of war. He
showed his cunning in stratagems of war, and in many
strange escapes from giants and man-eaters.